Soooooo, I've basically been MIA in blog-land for the past little while, so let me explain while also expressing apologies. The past 4 months have been pretty life-changing as my husband and I just relocated from the midwest to the west coast (the best coast!) and now find ourselves living in northern California and loving life. We packed up our entire lives, sold our condo in Chicago, I drove 33 hours solo across 2 time zones, and then started a new job. Also, by an incredibly lucky twist of fate, we find ourselves living at THE Pot Belly Beach (seriously) for the time being (permanent address TBD in 2016--keep the life changes coming!).

That being said, life has been a little crazy.

In the midst of the past several months of insanity, I did find myself 'husband-less' for about 6 weeks as he was back in Chicago and I was already working out here in CA. Needless to say, after the monotony of coming home late to an empty house, eating salad-for-one for dinner, and watching TV alone on my laptop, I knew what I needed: a project. Yes, a project. Ideally one that would take hours upon hours of my time, tap into my creative juices, and bonus points if several weeks went by where the surface of the kitchen table was not visible.

Presenting, Pot Belly Bird's holiday cards! I made a set of 38 of these for myself and just finished sending them out to my (ever growing) list of friends and family who I send Christmas cards to every year. Next year I will go to great lengths to promote and sell these prior to the holiday season, but I just couldn't make that happen this year. Surely you understand.

Upon careful inspection, you'll notice that the "wire" in this design is a ribbon that I sewed onto a card. Cards were either white or brown or red, ribbon and thread were either red or green (sometimes contrasting, other times the same color), and I had the most fun with the patterned birds. The photo above doesn't do it justice but that is white glitter paper! Plus there were green polka dot birds and red textured polka dot birds and various shades of green as well.

​By the way, rest assured that Pot Belly Bird is making it work with a temporary "kitchen table studio." Oh, and the beach views aren't too shabby.